By Tardsie

It happened just like this.

There were a lot more kids living in my neighborhood back at the time of the Cross-Lot Food Fight than there are today. In those days the town could support two elementary schools, and there wasn’t anywhere you could go within the city limits and not see a youthful face. This story is about young people, kids and young adults, and the delightfully destructive foolishness in which young people so often find themselves engaged.

It started when a flying tomato nearly knocked my neighbor Jason off his bike. A group of maybe six of us were playing in the street in a way kids rarely do these days, just being kids and not really playing at any one thing. Jason yelped as the crimson meteor sailed across his handlebars and dove into the street with a meaty thud. For a moment there was confusion; none of us had seen it coming.

We saw the volley that came next.

Four tomatoes arced through the empty air above an unused lot adjacent to the street, falling around us and striking the asphalt with heavy splats. Hoots of raucous laughter carried from behind the wooden plank fence at the far end of the lot, where because of the lot’s slope, we could see the head and shoulders of about a dozen people, all of them adults and old enough to know better.

War is hell.

The fog of war is deceiving, and there were some things we didn’t know. We believed that first Jason and then the rest of us had been the intended targets of the tomato barrage. We were not. In truth, when the whole thing kicked off, the gaggle of inebriated twenty-somethings had no idea we were even there. It started when first one of the guests, then a small mob, began raiding the yard’s tidy garden for tomatoes to hurl at a rusted-out jeep somebody had parked on the street side of the lot. The resident of the house, a hard-charging hellion named Brett, agreed that this was a fine idea. It didn’t matter, however, that we were never the intended targets; the opening salvo had been launched and we were now at war. We plucked the partially intact tomatoes from the pavement and from amidst the weeds of the lot and returned fire.

The drunken party-posse was throwing at us in earnest now, and we took some hits, but it kept us stocked in ammunition as we advanced on the fence. The barrage came hard, and by the time we reached the fence they’d run out of fresh tomatoes, and we were assailed by pulpy formless fruit that was sometimes just a bloody mess held together by a flap of skin. They plundered the garden’s treasures, and all manner of green and growing thing came sailing over the wooden divide that separated our two camps. One asshole even threw an entire watermelon over that fence; it sailed over the top of the wood for a few feet like some tie-dye zeppelin before plummeting earthward and spilling its guts into the weeds.

There’s no way to dress up hurling a watermelon at a child as anything but a terrible idea.

The only hit I took was as I climbed the fence, but it was a good one and left a bruise. As I came overtop the fence I interrupted a guy in the act of throwing a fairly intact and particularly unripe tomato. He walloped me in the side of the head and down I went. To his credit, my assailant was properly mortified that he’d punched a nine-year-old in the side of the head, and leaned over the fence to make sure I was all right. I gave him a face full of tomato scraps for his trouble.

The fight wound down not long after that. Having gained the yard, we didn’t know what to do with it, and anyway the garden was now just a churned and ravaged patch of earth. Also, just then the police showed up. The nasty old lady who lived next to me had called them, claiming an errant tomato had violated the sanctity of her front lawn. Small town cops can sometimes be the biggest dicks, and it didn’t help that the officer initially believed we’d vandalized a neighborhood garden in the most spectacular way imaginable. He was unkind, and one of my friends walked home crying, his wails trailing him all the way up the street. Fortunately, the drunken adults who had precipitated the messy melee came to our defense, and the affair ended rather anticlimactically.

“…therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Nobody plays in the empty lot any more. There just aren’t as many kids in town these days as when jobs were more plentiful and homes cheaper. My old elementary closed in the late 90s, and my kids go to the school across town. I haven’t spoken to Jason, the kid who nearly got knocked off his bike, in decades, but every now and then I see him in the front yard of his parents’ home and sometimes I’ll wave. I still talk to the kid who went home crying. He’s done well for himself, first as a political consultant here in the States, and now does PR work for various foreign regimes which need a little help refurbishing their public images. Brett, the drunken tosspot who hosted the garden-destroying party is now, predictably, a very successful and well-respected business owner who is rumored to enjoy spending time with his young grandchildren. Likewise, I can only assume that the rest of the fruit-chucking yahoos are now beloved pillars of the community. The old lady who called the cops is, of course, long-dead.

By Tardsie

Not all that long ago I discovered something new about myself. It wasn’t new, exactly—I’d been doing it for a long time without realizing it, but had only recently thought to ask to ask myself why.

You may already know that I have an unusual first name. It’s ethnic, kinda freaky; you hear it more as a last name if you hear it at all. Anyway, there’s a real good chance that somebody meeting me for the second time is gonna misremember my name, and call me by a different, but only slightly more common name. Here’s the thing: it’s always the same fucking name. And this other name is fairly rare, too–chances are the only time you can remember hearing it is as the last name of a moderately successful comedic actor from the 1980s.

People are always calling me ‘Murphy’ and I fucking hate it!

When someone calls me by that name, I’ll either correct them or I won’t, obviously. But it never occurred to me that there might be a pattern to this behavior. I simply assumed that there were some situations where for whatever reason I didn’t feel bothered correcting someone.

Eventually, I was able to tease out an identifiable pattern to my behavior, and it boils down to how I feel about the person. If I like the person, I’ll correct them. If I don’t, I won’t.

Getting to the motivations behind this behavior was a little more challenging, and when I did finally plumb the dark heart of this mystery, I found it was surprisingly passive-aggressive. You see, I’d unconsciously created a system whereby I could justify my negative opinions of the person. By not correcting them I pretty much ensured that they would continue to address me by the wrong name, which irritated me and in turn gave me more reason to not like them.

You’d think that once I became aware of this frankly childish and unproductive behavior I would have taken immediate steps to curtail it. You’d be wrong, though.

By Tardsie

In my previous post, Welcome to Pervert Alley, I briefly mentioned my friend Daniel, a guy who when I met him was in the process of rebuilding his life. He met a woman named Shelly and that all went to hell. This is how it happened.

Except For Being Granted Super-Strength By The Deity, All Other Details Of The Story Are Exactly The Same.

Daniel didn’t look like he belonged in Pervert Alley. Tall and straight-backed, with sunbleached blond hair and faded blue eyes, Daniel had a sunny, unselfconscious smile and skin that was thick and creased like well-worn leather, looking somehow like something he had earned under God’s own sun.

But nobody ends up at Pervert Alley by accident, and like every sorry member of the vast, shuffling rogues’ gallery snaking back in time to before I was born who called Pervert Alley home, something malignant had once upon a time crept into Daniel’s life and thrown it off the rails. But when I met Daniel he’d gotten himself healthy, and begun the first tender, tentative steps to pick up the pieces of a life which had never really begun.

Daniel met Shelly at an AA meeting. He’d was there by choice; she’d attended at the behest of the courts. Shelly was around forty and had a decent figure, but her hair was her best feature, cheery blond half-curls cut shoulder-length. Her face, though, was the fly in the ointment. She might have been pretty once, but time and bad living had made her features plain, and it was the dark vulpine thing crouching just behind her eyes that made her repellent.

Shelly Doesn’t Have What You’d Call “Inner Beauty.”

Daniel loved Shelly with the kind of beautiful, monolithic, Junior-year-of-high-school adoration that is the stuff of Hallmark Greeting Cards, effusive and inexhaustible. It was a sentiment Shelly was, I believe, incapable of reciprocating. She was of that low and vulgar tribe of skulkers and creepers, backroad vampires and poorhouse parasites, who survive through the generosity or kindness or vulnerability of the very hosts whose lives they plunder, taking what they find valuable and leaving behind a spent and ruptured husk.

Shelly’s Yearbook Photo Her Senior Year At The Ruby Rose School For Wayward Girls.

Daniel stuck with Shelly even when she went back to jail for an outstanding warrant, and was there to meet her when she came out, and believed her unquestioningly when she declared herself a changed woman. And later, after she had stormed out of Pervert Alley and Daniel’s life for the first time, and had before long changed her mind, he took her back, joyously and without rancor, and did it again when the same thing happened just a few days later. He took her back every time she left him, which was often, and it got so that the state of Daniel’s door indicated the status of their relationship. The door stood open when they were together, the two of them often sitting on the hovel’s small porch, or wandering the lot, Daniel mostly blissfully, beatifically silent, while Shelly talked at anyone who would listen. When Shelly was gone the door was closed, and the deep, impenetrable blackness would bleed through the small curtained windows.

Shelly started bringing strange men to Daniel’s home—lean young men with the same hungry eyes as Shelly; Daniel didn’t seem to care as long as Shelly came around. Those men would take Shelly places in the car that my grandmother signed over to Daniel in exchange for some work he’d done around her place, but which he could no longer drive because of an infection in his foot. When Daniel went to the hospital, Shelly and her new friends kept Daniel’s apartment warm for him.

Seriously, She Sucked.

Shelly was somewhere else when Daniel came home from the hospital with a nasty MRSA infection, and #6 was dark for a while. She came back to him at least one more time, though, because the last time I saw Daniel, Shelly was with him.

This was at least a year ago now, at an hour by which most decent folks have already gone to bed. I take walks sometimes late at night and they surprised me, two vague shapes conjured from the darkness and seeming to materialize from the shadows of the coffee shop. Daniel was hooded and his eyes were in shadow, his flesh drawn and waxy. He had grown a beard, which I’d never seen before. It made him look hard and a little bit hungry. He offered me a tepid, hesitant smile which never reached the eyes that failed to meet my own and mumbled something friendly by way of greeting.

Shelly seized my hand in both of hers before I knew it. Her hands were firm and smooth and unpleasantly moist and she did not let go. Her weasel’s eyes were in constant motion, suffuse with dark merriment. Her breath was hot and whiskey-fouled. She slurred her way through a string of platitudes about my family and complimented me on my children. I don’t remember exactly what she said; I was only half-listening—although I recall she got my wife’s name wrong— and feeling very much like a coyote with his leg caught in a trap, contemplating whether it might not be worth it just to gnaw the damn thing off. When I finally did get away, I held my right hand away from my body the way you do when you’ve touched something filthy, until I could scrub it pink with soap and hot water.

So There’s Precedent…

I guess Shelly left Daniel for good after that, and I heard that he lost a few toes from one of his feet. He’s been gone for a couple months now, down in a hospital in LA and I don’t know if he’s coming back. I saw Shelly once after that just a few weeks later. She was curbside with some shifty nameless no-account in front of the supermarket holding a cardboard sign which read HUNGRY ANYTHING HELPS GOD BLESS.

You probably get that I blame Shelly for what’s become of Daniel, and it’s true, I do. Like some sort of psychic tapeworm, she plundered Daniel, gorging herself on everything that was worthwhile and vital, the very qualities which had set him somehow apart from his Pervert Alley confederates, the things which made him dream of a life so much of the country takes for granted. and when she had taken all this and grown fat off his tears, she cast his carcass aside, her eyes already on the make for a new host. I blame Shelly not only because she understood what she was doing and knew also the unspeakable sum Daniel had wagered on her and what, therefore, her treachery would cost him, but because I truly believe she took pleasure in the ruin of a decent man.

I’m wrong to blame Shelly, though–as much as I want to. It’s like this: when someone we care about falls, we cast about desperately for a culprit, and more often than not, we find it. Drugs and alcohol. Infidelity and divorce. Lay-offs and health woes. Life–these are some of the things we say can destroy an existence. Our thoughtless tongues grant these episodes a totemic power that, mighty as they are, they do not deserve. The truth is sometimes more painful. The truth is that striving to make a life for yourself and trying every day to make it better, and maybe sharing that life with another, raising children, taking vacations, meeting obligations, being loved—all the things we have for so long taken for granted—these things take effort. Every day is a tightrope walk across a yawning chasm at the bottom of which lies abject failure, and our fear keeps us upright and allows us to forget the dark truth that it would be so much easier to simply submit to gravity’s implacable embrace and fall, fall, fall to that grey and lifeless land where nothing is expected and nothing given. Sometimes the thing you want asks more from you than you believe is within you to give. I think that’s how it was with Daniel, really. Shelly was a loaded pistol, sleek and seductive and lethal, but the finger caressing the trigger was always Daniel’s.

By Tardsie

In which we strive for greater cross-cultural understanding.

Disclaimer: This video contains a slur, uttered without any venom. It also contains several words from a foreign language depicted as meaning something other than what they actually do, and that’s probably racist. You’ve been warned.

By Tardsie

In which amends cannot be made.

Note: Any comments about my headwear will rightly taken as an insult to my proud cultural heritage and an affront to the land of my fathers. And you should know that, historically, those people don’t take perceived threats well at all.

By Tardsie

The Gunslinger Sleeps With One Eye Open, Forever Waiting For The Younger Man With A Faster Gun He Knows Must Someday Come For Him.

I drank a lot when I was younger. Too much, I guess. I enjoyed the consciousness-altering aspect of booze, and for a while, there was a novelty to getting fucked-up. When, as is the nature of novelty, it wore off, I found I didn’t drink so much anymore.

Some years later, it turned out that a co-worker of mine, John, was acquainted with some of my old college friends. My college friends regaled John with only the most debauched and asinine of my collegiate exploits. It was a somewhat incomplete picture of the person I had been as a youngster, and about a million miles from the reality of my life at that moment. Based largely on this erroneous image, John challenged me to a drinking contest at an upcoming office party.

A drinking contest? The idea was a loser from the get-go. I had largely put my boozing behind me, but John had kept himself in fighting trim. This was a bet I was almost certain to lose.

It’s Hard To Pinpoint Any One Particular Reason I Stopped Drinking So Much.

Faced with this challenge today, I would have no problem begging off, using my lameness and general decrepitude as an excuse. But at twenty-five or so, I was still very much in the throes of a delayed adolescence, and my carefully crafted self-image would not allow me to ignore this challenge from a younger, stronger, faster predator. Moreover, I would have to go beyond merely showing up for John’s challenge; I could not simply shuffle complacently to my own ass-whipping. Not only did I have no choice but to accept, I had to win.

To assist me in this endeavor, I had a card up my sleeve worth a dozen battle-hardened livers, an advantage so pronounced as to change the course of battle even before the sound of the first shot: my exemplary cunning. John believed that the drinking contest would begin–and thus be won or lost–when we first took up our glasses. He was wrong.

“All right,” I said, showing him my game face, “Let’s do it. But I don’t want to pussy around, dude–if we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right: we’ll drink Jäger.”

Jäger Has Made My Life Immeasurably Richer Simply By Being In It, And I Don’t Care Who Knows It.

For those unfamiliar with the cough syrup-meets-black licorice charm of Jägermeister, the iconic kraut tipple is made from a variety of spices and despite being only 70 proof, has fostered a reputation for fucking your shit up. People spoke of Jäger in the breathless, quasi-mystic tones normally reserved for absinthe and peyote. Some people said it contained traces of deer blood, others opium. For whatever reason, I’ve never had a problem with Jäger, and consider its fearsome reputation to be entirely overblown.

But that reputation had precisely the effect I’d intended. Having proposed the wager, John could hardly refuse. He agreed, but with markedly less enthusiasm than when he first suggested it. Jägermeister it would be.

I Heard About A Dude Who Named His Child–HIS CHILD!–“Jäger Meier.” Some People Should Not Be Allowed To Have Children.

The party was at a co-worker’s house, and being a work-related party, both John and I agreed not to start our competition until later in the evening when the more reputable guests had left. John and I went to the keg together and filled our cups. Although John and I both returned to the keg several times that evening, I was nursing my beer and “filling” it when it was already nearly full. John, however, appeared to be drinking with abandon.

When it was time to throw down in our liquor-based contest of manhood—well, I guess you already know that I kicked his ass. It wasn’t even close. When I left the party, John was on hands & knees in the front lawn, heaving a black and hideous mess into the grass. I gave his shoulder a squeeze and said some comforting but ultimately condescending words as I passed. I kept my dignity all the while, and waited at least until I was in the car before I began convulsively to spew, coating the door and good portion of the seat. Happily for everyone, it was my girlfriend’s car.

***

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.